PROPOSALS ARE CLOSED : PLEASE DO NOT ADD NEW PRECONFERENCES TO THIS PAGE

Proposals were accepted through December 6th, 2013.

It would be really, super duper helpful if folks who think they might want to attend a pre-conference could indicate interest by adding your name to a session below.

Note

Attendance at a pre-conference will require a small fee due at the time of conference registration".

Although this was specified in the email announcements relating to pre-conferences, it was not added to this page until December 2nd. I (Adam C.) apologize for the omission and I hope this will not cause any "sticker shock." Putting your name on this list does not incur any obligation on your part, but we'll be using it to gauge interest and work out room assignments.

Please put your pre-conference on the list in the following format:

Code4Lib 2014 Pre-Conference Proposals

Drupal4lib Sub-con Barcamp

Full Day

This will be a full day of self-selected barcamp style sessions. Anyone who wants to present can write down the topic on an index card and, after the keynote, we will vote to choose what we want to see. Attendees can also pick a topic and attempt to talk someone else into presenting on it.

This event is open to the library community. There will be a nominal fee (t/b/d) for non-Code4LibCon attendees (subject to organizer approval).

Morning

Afternoon

Open Refine Hackfest

Open Refine is a powerful open source tool for wrangling messy data that can also be used to help in the creation of Linked Data via the Reconciliation API. It is possible to write reconciliation services against API's, like the VIAF service or, even just against local authority files for helping maintain authority control

The session would first introduce Open Refine, then walk through building a reconciliation service, and the rest of the session would be a hackfest where we build new reconciliation services for public consumption or local use.

Interested in Attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

Adam Constabaris

Jason Stirnaman

Joshua Gomez

Sam Kome

Mike Beccaria

Angela Zoss

A. Soroka

Matt Zumwalt

Jim LeFager

Responsive Design Hackfest

"Half-Day [Afternoon]"

Contact Jim Hahn, University of Illinois, jimfhahn@gmail.com

Contact David Ward, University of Illinois, dh-ward@illinois.edu

This structured hackfest will give attendees an opportunity to explore methods to create responsive mobile apps using the Bootstrap framework [1]and a set of APIs for accessing library data. We will start with an API template for creating space-based mobile tools that draw from work coming out of the IMLS funded Student/Library Collaborative grant [2]. Available APIs will include a room reservation template and codebase for implementing at any campus and the set of Minrva catalog APIs generating JSONP [3].

Hosts will give a brief report of a study on student hacking projects and interests in mobile library apps that are the basis for the templates utilized in this Hackathon. By the end of the pre-conference attendees will have a sample responsive mobile web app in Bootstrap 3 to bring back to their campus which can plug into their site-based content.

Interested in Attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here:

Intro to Blacklight

"Half-Day [Morning]"

Contact: Chris Beer, Stanford University, cabeer@stanford.edu

TA: Bess Sadler, Stanford University, bess@stanford.edu

This session will be walk-through of the architecture of Blacklight, the community, and an introduction to building a Blacklight-based application. Each participant will have the opportunity to build a simple Blacklight application, and make basic customizations, while using a test-driven approach.

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

Megan Kudzia

Bret Davidson

Coral Sheldon-Hess

Cory Lown

Emily Daly

Angela Zoss

Sean Aery

Francis Kayiwa

Heidi Frank

Junior Tidal

Ted Lawless

David Lacy

Erik Hatcher

Jon Baer

Blacklight Hackfest

"Half-Day [Afternoon]"

Contact Chris Beer, Stanford University, cabeer@stanford.edu

This afternoon hackfest is both a follow-on to the Intro to Blacklight morning session to continue building Blacklight-based applications, and also an opportunity for existing Blacklight contributors and members of the Blacklight community to exchange common patterns and approaches into reusable gems or incorporate customizations into Blacklight itself.

RailsBridge: Intro to programming in Ruby on Rails

Interested in learning how to program? Want to build your own web application? Never written a line of code before and are a little intimidated? There's no need to be! RailsBridge is a friendly place to get together and learn how to write some code.

RailsBridge is a great workshop that opens the doors to projects like Blacklight and Hydra.

Interested in Attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

This is a revival of rosy1280's LITA Forum Pre-Conference, but better (because iteration is good) and adapted to c4lib types.

Interested in Attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

Robin Dean

Erin White

Andrew Darby

Sam Kome

Ryan Scherle

Will Shaw

Liz Milewicz

Cynthia "Arty" Ng

Laurie Lee Moses (if I don't do the Hackfest for Blacklight)

Ranti Junus

Bohyun Kim (Afternoon)

Mike Hagedon

Chris Hallberg

Susan Ivey

Ian Chan (afternoon)

Fail4Lib 2014

Half Day [TBD, probably afternoon]

Contacts:

Andreas Orphanides, akorphan (at) ncsu.edu

Jason Casden, jmcasden (at) ncsu.edu

The task of design (and the work that we do as library coders) is intimately tied to failure. Failures, both big and small, motivate us to create and improve. Failures are also occasionally the result of our work. Understanding and embracing failure, encouraging enlightened risk-taking, and seeking out opportunities to fail and learn are essential to success in our field. At Fail4Lib, we'll talk about our own experiences with projects gone wrong, explore some famous design failures in the real world, and talk about how we can come to terms with the reality of failure, to make it part of our creative process -- rather than something to be feared.

The schedule may include the following:

Case studies. We'll look at some classic failures from the literature: What can we learn from the mistakes of others?

Confessionals, for those willing to share. Talk about your own experiences with rough starts, labor pains, and doomed projects in your own work: What can we learn from our own (and each others') failures?

Group therapy. Let's talk about how to deal with risk management, failed projects, experimental endeavors, and more: How can we make ourselves, our colleagues, and our organizations more fault tolerant? How do we make sure we fail as productively as possible?

Interested in attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

Bret Davidson

Mike Graves

Jason Stirnaman

Julia Bauder

Linda Ballinger

Scott Hanrath

Caitlin Christian-Lamb

Ian Walls

Scott Bacon

mx matienzo

Chris Sharp

Junior Tidal

Julie Rudder

David Uspal

CLLAM @ code4lib

(Computational Linguistics for Libraries, Archives and Museums)

Full Day

Contacts:

Douglas W. Oard (primary), oard (at) umd.edu

Corey Harper, corey (dot) harper (at) nyu.edu

Robert Sanderson, azaroth42 (at) gmail.com

Robert Warren, rwarren (at) math.carleton.ca

We will hack at the intersection of diverse content from Libraries, Archives and Museums and bleeding edge tools from computational linguistics for slicing and dicing that content. Did you just acquire the email archives of a startup company? Maybe you can automatically build an org chart. Have you got metadata in a slew of languages? Perhaps you can search it all using one query. Is name authority control for e-resources getting too costly? Let’s see if entity linking techniques can help. These are just a few teasers.

There’ll be plenty of content and tools supplied, but please bring your own [data] too -- you’ll hack with it in new ways throughout the day. We’ll get started with some lightning talks on what we’ve brought,then we’ll break up into groups to experiment and work on the ideas that appeal. Three guaranteed outcomes: you’ll walk away with new ideas, new tools, and new people you’ll have met.

Interested in attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

Devon Smith

Kevin S. Clarke

Jason Stirnaman

Joshua Gomez

Carolina Garcia

Tom Burton-West

Dan Scott

Devin Higgins

Mark Breedlove

GeoHydra: Managing geospatial content

Half-day [Afternoon]

Contact: Darren Hardy, Stanford University, drh@stanford.edu

Moderator: Bess Sadler, Stanford University, bess@stanford.edu

Do you have digitized maps, GIS datasets like Shapefiles, aerial photography,
etc., all of which you want to integrate into your digital repository? In this
workshop, we will discuss how Hydra can provide discovery, delivery, and
management services for geospatial assets, as well as solicit questions about
your own GIS projects. We aim to help answer the following questions you might have about putting geospatial data into your Hydra-based digital library:

Librarianship is largely made up of women, yet women are significantly underrepresented in tech positions, on any level, within libraries themselves. Why? What are we doing to encourage women to become more involved in STEM within librarianship? What kind of message are we sending when library technology keynotes remain almost resolutely male? How are we changing the face of technology, not only within libraries, but with the field itself? How are we training our staff and colleagues in the areas of fairness and removal of bias? Our vendors?

Lots of tough questions.

While the conversation has been going on via various blogs and articles within the last few years, it was given a public face at Internet Librarian 2013 where a panel of 7 (four women, three men) gave personal experiences on the above and then opened up the conversation to the audience. As eye opening and enriching the conversation was, a 45 minute panel was not enough. One thing remains clear: We need to keep the conversation moving forward and start making some radical changes in the way we think, act, and how we need to harness this to start making real changes within librarianship itself.

Those attending should expect: Begin with opening up the conversation of experiences and talking about what is most needed, spending remaining time putting together live, usable solutions to start implementing as well as pushing the conversation forward at local levels

Interested in Attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

The File Analyzer application was used by the US National Archives to validate 3.5 million digitized images from the 1940 Census. After implementing a customized ingest workflow within the File Analyzer, the Georgetown University Libraries was able to process an ingest backlog of over a thousand files of digital resources into DigitalGeorgetown, the Libraries’ Digital Collections and Institutional Repository platform. Georgetown is currently developing customized workflows that integrate Apache Tika, BagIt, and Marc conversion utilities.

The File Analyzer is a desktop application with a powerful framework for implementing customized file validation and transformation rules. As new rules are deployed, they are presented to users within a user interface that is easy (and powerful) to use.

The first half of this session will be targeted to potential users and developers. The second half of the session will be targeted towards developers who are interested in developing custom rules for the application.

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

Michael Doran

Collecting social media data with Social Feed Manager

Half-Day [Morning]

Contacts:

Dan Chudnov, GW Libraries, dchud (at) gwu.edu

Dan Kerchner, GW Libraries, kerchner (at) gwu.edu

Laura Wrubel, GW Libraries, lwrubel (at) gwu.edu

Social media data is a popular material for research and a new format for building collections. What does it take to collect meaningfully from Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Weibo, Facebook, and other sites? We will:

Introduce options for collections, including both high- and low-end commercial offerings. Discuss what it means to collect these resources, covering boundaries, policies, and workflows required to develop a social media collection program in your institution.

Explore the Twitter API in depth, with hands-on opportunities for those w/laptops and others who want to team up w/them

Help you get started using the free Social Feed Manager (SFM) app we're developing at GW to create your first collections. We’ll demo its use and demo a clean install (those w/environments can follow along)

Interested in Attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

Afternoon agenda: Focused talks around specific tools followed by general discussion, connections, opportunities, aspirations, and planning.

Tool examples:

Archivespace

STEADy

"RAMP" (Remixing Archival Metadata Project)

OpenRefine

Aeon

Interested in Attending

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here

Morning:

Julia Bauder

Afternoon:

your name

All day:

Josh Wilson

Sam Kome

Linda Ballinger

Caitlin Christian-Lamb

Laurie Lee Moses (seriously hard to decide here!)

David Bass

John Rees

Lynn Eaton

Hillel Arnold

Susan Ivey

Kristen Merryman

Mark Mounts

John Sarnowski

AV Content Slam

Half-Day [morning]
Contacts:

Kara Van Malssen, kara (at) avpreserve.com

Lauren Sorenson, laurens (at) bavc.org

Steven Villereal , villereal (at) gmail.com

A morning BarCamp/unconference for practitioners and coders who work with audiovisual content. The agenda will be attendee-driven, with a focus on sharing, synthesizing, and improving workflow strategies and documentation for software-based approaches to wrangling and providing access to audio and video content.
Possible topics of discussion might include:

Use of format id and characterization/metadata extraction tools for AV

Notes

OCLC Web Services Hackfest

This half-day hackfest will explore some of the OCLC Developer Network web services. We will provide an overview of some of the common topics such as the general REST-based architecture for most services and how to use some new authentication clients. The group can then decide to take a deep dive into a particular API and/or write a client library for the community.

If you would be interested in attending, please indicate by adding your name (but not email address, etc.) here:

Obey the Testing Goat!: Test Driven Web Development From The Ground Up

Test driven development is a proven method for producing better quality code. But I've found it hard to follow a strict TDD methodology when starting new web projects. How do you write that first test when there is no code or web pages created yet.

In this session, we will follow the excellent book "Test-Driven Web Development with Python" to create a simple web site in Django following TDD from the first character typed. Come ready to code and test. No prior knowledge of python or Django required.

By the end of this session, you should be able to "Obey the Testing Goat" from the start to finish for your next project.

Link Dump

"Two Scoops of Django" was mentioned by Birkin and another gentleman (thanks!) as being a great source for best practices with Django. There is a lot of decision making in regards to project layout and such in Django, and this is a really good guide for this aspect of development in Django.

"twill - simple http scripting" - twill is a great, easy and quick tool for testing basic http responses from your server. We use it to do continue integration testing from a cron job. Really handy...

"Travis CI" - continuous integration server as a service. A lot easier than setting up a jenkins server, and free for public github repos. Also, fun to watch!!!

Summon Hackfest

The Summon Hackfest (10:30am-12pm) will be a great opportunity for libraries using the Summon service to talk about improving discovery of resources, share their creative customizations and code, and exchange ideas about ways they can leverage the Summon API to better meet the needs of their users.

The Summon Hackfest is open to all libraries currently using ProQuest discovery and management services (Intota, Summon, Ulrich’s or the 360 suite of services), whether they are attending Code4Lib or are just in the area.